Poetry. "Take Zach Savich's THE FIRESTORM as one proof of Emerson's assertion that the mind's nature is volcanic. A firestorm is such a conflagration that it produces above it its own atmosphere. And so a reader finds in Savich's pages a super-heated cloud in which the poet's voice grows multiple, grows active, and the poem records the intimate collisions of lines that veer from prophecy to aphorism to ribald wit to stoic speculation. If this sounds nebulous, it is not. It is fulgurative, lightning-like, shot through sudden flashes of experience that in the sudden afterglow reveal that experience also experiences itself. Such is the complicated place where wit turns witness, and in doing so, opens up the deeper ironies—ironies that at first glance seem quite plain: 'I have forgotten if I am pulling the curtain open or closed.' Savich pulls the curtain open and closed, showing us again poetry's paradoxical necessity: that the poem must show and hide at once, reveal and obscure simultaneously, and that a song that thinks makes of its melody a matter that matters."—Dan Beachy-Quick
Author City: AMHERST, MA USA
Zach Savich is the author of three books of poetry, Full Catastrophe Living (University of Iowa Press, 2009), Annulments (Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, 2010), and THE FIRESTORM (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), as well as a chapbook, THE MAN WHO LOST HIS HEAD (Omnidawn, 2010), and a book of creative nonfiction on art and the imagination, EVENTS FILM CANNOT WITHSTAND (Rescue Press, 2011). He has won the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, the Omnidawn Chapbook Poetry Prize, and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's Open Competition. His poems, essays, and reviews appear widely in journals such as A Public Space, DENVER QUARTERLY, Boston Review, Jellyfish, and Gulf Coast. He serves as book review editor with The Kenyon Review.
Reviews and Other Links
Rachel Abramowitz @ the Oxonian Review
interview by Gregory Lawless @ H_NGM_N
Alissa Fleck @ NewPages
Danniel Schoonebeek @ The Rumpus
Jessica Binkley @ Front Porch Journal